
\section{Conclusion} \label{conclusion}

In this paper, we have argued that overspecification in referring expressions enhances lexical acquisition. More specifically, we have shown that subjects learning Russian words via a virtual-world task not only had better success rates when they were provided with overspecified training exercises, but also that the subjects themselves evaluated the exercises as more useful. We believe our results offer evidence that alignment is enhanced by overspecification.

Due to the positive results on the usefulness of overspecification that we obtained, we are currently extending a RE generation algorithm~\cite{Areces_Koller_Striegnitz_2008} which decides which information to overspecify. The algorithm is trained on corpora that contain REs in the domain. It would be interesting to continue this direction of research, studying the effect of the situatedness of the virtual world on reference as well as the link between overspecification and multi-utterance REs.


